Electronic transaction and request applications are based on business partnerships between different enterprises. The basic requirement for a successful processing of request is its capacity to establish a dynamic relationship among a large number of customer and service providers in a distributed computing environment. One important and necessary component to enable the automation is a mechanism that supports and/or facilitates the cooperation and collaboration between different users in different enterprises.
There are several different approaches for supporting a business process based on inter-enterprise business partnerships, where the parties across enterprise boundaries are unlikely to be organized under a centralized coordinator. Further, the collaboration is typically followed by defined rules and protocols with a pre-defined sequence of steps.
In one example, to process any transaction based on a customer request a service provider is required to seek information or clarification from various stakeholders engaged in different roles in varied enterprises. The information sought is context specific with no specific defined steps or procedures. To gain such information a service provider is required to adhere to unstructured serial collaboration. Such collaboration requires a service provider to avoid automation and adopt ad-hoc manual asynchronous mechanisms of phone calls, emails and SMSs to complete the transaction at hand. These conventional means of obtaining information are often time consuming and prone to errors. Such scattered asynchronous mechanism doesn't provide means to record the discussions or method to store the decisions for further review and measurement.
These conventional asynchronous mechanisms of exchanging information are often ineffective at maximizing collaborative efforts. Further, a lot of manual effort is spent on back and forth serial asynchronous collaboration which may have an adverse impact on the measurement of turnaround time of processing a transaction request.
In one example, to affect cross enterprise collaboration, a computer implements a pre-defined set of workflow steps and activities to be performed within the workflow. Such pre-defined workflow steps don't provide opportunity to customize the steps based on particular requirement or context. Typically, the execution of the workflow steps is affected by different instances of same server in different enterprises i.e. multiple process instances which are later synchronized.